by Tom Beasley

This week in the news …

• The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York City was lit - an annual tradition celebrating its 75th anniversary. This year marks the first-ever solar-powered tree.
• David Zaslav, president of Discovery Communications, received an award from Global Green for programming focused on environmental issues over the past 20 years.
• Through a program called GreenChill, the EPA and supermarkets have teamed up to put the chill on greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances caused by refrigeration.
• The city of Chicago, which says it has the most alleys of any city in the world, is on track to 'green' 1,900 miles of alleys to conserve water and reduce summer heat.

These are just a few of the news announcements from the past few days. Green is everywhere, creeping into every aspect of our lives - which is great news for everyone on earth, for future generations, and for the environment. And it's doing great things for businesses, too. In fact, some of today's best business practices are also the greenest ones.

Analyst firm Gartner recently delivered their much-anticipated annual list of the top ten tech trends that will be a strategic focus for businesses in 2008. Care to guess what topped the list? Green IT. We've included the entire list, if you're interested in reading about the other nine technologies, but this issue of The AccuView zeroes in on green workplace ideas.

The team at AccuImage is poised to help you implement Green IT practices in 2008. (And yes, we can also help you deal with Gartner's other nine tech trends.) We invite you to call us at 615.242.7226 to discuss your needs for the coming year.

Best regards,
Tom Beasley
tom.beasley@accuimagellc.com

Gartner analysts have highlighted the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2008. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

"Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years," said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan."

The top ten strategic technologies for 2008 include:

Green IT. The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Some companies are emphasizing their social responsibility behavior, which might result in vendor preferences and policies that affect IT decisions. Scheduling decisions for workloads on servers will begin to consider power efficiency as a key placement attribute.

Unified Communications. Today, 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80 percent are already doing trials of some form. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this, the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Business Process Modeling. Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in a service-oriented architecture center of excellence, some in a process center of excellence and some in both. The strategic imperative for 2008 is to bring these groups together. Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA development.

Metadata Management. Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company's information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.

Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies - with service-level, policy-based active management - resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. Virtualization plus service-level, policy-based automation constitutes an RTI.

Mashup and Composite Apps. By 2010, web mashups will be the dominant model (80 percent) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.

Web Platform and WOA. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Meanwhile web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications and business processes through web-based "cloud computing" environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric. A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner's needs. For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server.

Real World Web. The term "real world web" is informal, referring to places where information from the web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred. For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real world web of augmented reality. Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation.

Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.

"These ten opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as we as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies," said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer."

[Source: Gartner, October 9, 2007]

By one estimate, if the paper used each year for personal computing were laid end to end, it would circle the earth more than 800 times. Instead of decreasing paper consumption, technological advancements have actually contributed to an increase in printing and paper use. However, you have choices when you print and copy documents that will help to reduce the amount of paper you consume and the amount you need to file or transport.

There are electronic alternatives to many document management tasks. Consider the quick, simple strategies below. Be creative. Do your best to use as little paper as possible.

• Distribute documents electronically. The most common method is to e-mail your files as attachments. Workflow applications can also facilitate electronic document routing.
• Archive documents electronically. You can save space while helping the environment by archiving your documents on a network drive instead of printing and filing them.
• Use a projector for your next meeting. Consider using an LCD projector and laptop to present materials at your next meeting. In addition to saving paper, you can make changes to your documents on the fly while discussing them with colleagues.
• Review and edit documents electronically. Many applications, like Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, include many features for adding notes and corrections to documents.

When you must print or copy, do more with less by …

• Using both sides of the paper. Print double-sided documents by using a duplex (or double-sided) printer or by re-feeding paper through single-sided printers. If using the copy machine, make double-sided copies. Consider setting your default printing and copying options to use both sides of the paper.
• Using smaller fonts and margins. Fitting more words on a page is a simple way to reduce the number of pages you have to print.
• Specifying draft quality printing. Conserve toner or ink by using draft quality settings whenever possible. These can be found in the Print Properties or Print Preferences section of the print menu on most systems. Many printers also offer the options of printing multiple, miniature pages on one side of the paper.
• Using scrap paper to print draft documents. Keep a box of scrap paper next to your printer and use it to print draft documents.
• Printing select pages only. If you don't need to print an entire multi-page document, try printing just the single page or range of pages that you need.
• Using recycled paper to reduce consumption of virgin tree stock.

[Source: Columbia University]

As organizations look toward new ways of enhancing their corporate social responsibility, quite often, one of the most obvious areas of improvement is overlooked. Not only does paper scanning and electronic document management help companies achieve their sustainability goals, it also helps reduce costs and improve efficiency.

According to one industry expert, companies are overlooking the financial and environmental benefits of document management, which will offer them a competitive advantage, while decreasing their ecological footprint. "Will the paperless office we were promised back in 1975 happen in our lifetime? Probably not," he says. "However, the efficiency and environmental benefits of such a concept can be obtained today."

With the third wave of document management upon us, the days of multimillion-dollar solutions are quickly becoming nothing more than a memory. With electronic document management well within the budget of any organization, customers are expecting faster response times. Financial departments are finding ways to reduce overhead through the automation of manual business processes. And most importantly the environmentalists in all of us are looking for ways to reduce paper consumption. "Sustainability and corporate social responsibility extend beyond industry imposed regulations. They are concepts that I feel we have a responsibility to voluntarily adhere to, in order to help improve the quality of life for our employees, clients and society as a whole. By managing our records electronically we can drastically reduce our paper consumption and office supplies which will have a beneficial impact on our consumption of natural resources."

[Source: Hybrid Document Systems]

AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.